Should Facebook be banned at the office?

There's a lot that goes into play when you're discussing worker productivity and thier access to certain sites in the Internet that may be taking too much of the corporate time, network resources and opens the door to a whole slew of possible malicious attacks

Some IT managers have made the case that the risk is not justified and many companies have cracked down on sites like Facebook, Myspace and a bunch of other community networks.

Any employee needs to be reminded that all his actions are actually being monitored, and everything he does on the Internet is probably going through a corporate proxy/firewall server of some sort. Since Facebook and other sites don't offer SSL encryption for thier users, the end result is that your IT manager can see EVERY SINGLY WORD YOU WROTE on Facebook. He can read it in clear text.

It managers are also fearful from the effects of spam, spyware and other malicious applications that might infiltrate thier corporate network through seemingly harmless applications that the users might be lured to download into thier company's network.

Despite all of that, many companies still allow thier employees to browse freely to almost anywhere they like on the Internet. With limited or no restrictions. But many fear the days of completely unrestricted access to online services might be numbered. Even worse, there are fears that certain schools and collages might follow in the footsteps of major corporations in this trend.

So what do you think? Should Facebook be banned from the office? Consider both the employee and the employer point of views.